Light (Studies on Crossing III), 2018
Yon Natalie Mik
Curated by the Korean Art Department of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
Choreographed and performed by Yon Natalie Mik as part of the Korean Inspiration Festival.
Photography by Charlie Kim; Videography by Christian Alvarez
Light is a live choreographic work that studies the embodied knowledge embedded within Korean burial rituals. Developed through observation of the subtle gestures that accompany communal mourning — the slow shifting of weight, repetitive offerings, guiding motions, bowing, holding, and the careful tending of the deceased — the piece treats these ritual actions as a form of embodied data. Each movement carries affective, historical, and spiritual information, revealing how communities process grief, continuity, and transition through the body. Light frames these gestures as a somatic information system: a way of organizing and transmitting knowledge that exists outside institutional archives and beyond the legibility of contemporary sociotechnical systems. The performance investigates how mourning practices embody forms of relational logic — slowing time, redistributing attention, and creating temporary structures of care that hold both the living and the dead.
